With nearly a dozen ethnic groups and languages, Assam’s identity politics can be fairly confusing for an outsider, as Rahul Gandhi may have discovered when he came on a campaign visit in February. Several groups had called for an Assam bandh – all for different reasons.

As the Assam Tribune reported, "While the Bengali Yuva Chatra Parishad (BYCP) called the Assam bandh to raise the D-voter issue, the Adivasi National Convention (ANC), a combined forum of more than 20 Adivasi organisations, called a 48-hour bandh…in protest against the failure of the Congress-led government to fulfil the demands of the Adivasis in Assam. The Tai Ahom Yuva Parishad (TAYP) and the All Koch Rajbongshi Students Union (AKRSU) called the bandh in protest against alleged exploitation and negligence towards the indigenous people of the State by the Congress."

In this set of grievances, the D-voter issue stands out, for it brings together Assam’s politics of identity with its other source of churn – the politics of immigration.

D-voter is a category of voters who have been declared “doubtful” by the Election Commission, because they have failed to produce legal documents of citizenship.

For a state which has 1.87 crore eligible voters, D-voters are numerically insignificant. They number just 1.43 lakhs.

And yet, D-voters are at the centre of the state's electoral politics.

To understand why, one needs to know a bit of Assam’s recent history. At the intersection of many civilisations, Assam has forever been a shifting landscape of peoples. A century and half ago, prompted in part by the needs of the British colonial economy, Assam saw large-scale migrations from Bihar, Orissa and Bengal. The anxiety over immigration built up after Independence, and heightened in the years after the Bangladesh war, becoming intense enough in the early 1980s to draw in a large section of Assamese society into agitations and protests led by a students movement. The unrest let up a little in 1985, when the centre and the student leaders signed the Assam Accord, which aimed to stem the tide of immigrants from Bangladesh by setting up foreigners tribunals that would hold trials of people suspected of sneaking in without papers, and to deport them, if found guilty. The cut-off date was set at March 24, 1971. The same year, the students movement, which transformed into a political party, the Assam Gana Parishad, swept the polls, and formed the government. It was Assam’s Aam Aadmi Party moment.

But it soon began to fray. In 1986, a young correspondent named Shekhar Gupta reported for India Today magazine that the agitators turned administrators were overwhelmed by the practical difficulties of identifying illegal immigrants and bringing them to trial. “Ours is a situation of walking the tightrope over a swollen Brahmaputra," an AGP minister told him.

By the mid-nineties, the focus of the anti-immigrant efforts came to rest on the electoral rolls. In 1997, the Election Commission undertook a verification exercise in which voters were asked to produce documents that would establish they had come to Assam before 1971. Those who could not produce documents were marked as D-voters.

The denial of voting rights might not be the worse fallout of being labelled a D-voter. If you are marked as one, you live in the fear of being dragged to a tribunal, where in case you are declared an illegal Bangladeshi immigrant, you could be picked up by the police, sent to a detention camp and one day “pushed back” over the border, the rough-and-ready method of deportation that authorities favour.

Of 29,237 people declared as foreigners by the tribunals since 1985, 2,442 have been pushed back. The number is small for anti-immigration groups, but significant for the state’s Bengali-speakers.

Such is the anxiety over immigration that even the crime briefs in the newspapers tap into it. Here is one from December 2013: “One Bangladeshi illegal immigrant caught under Guwahati Railway police net today. Identified as Rahul Misra, 28 years, reportedly haired a seat in Dibrugarh-New Delhi North-East Express rail from where he was taken under custody, police said.”

Contrary to the belief held by a large number of mainland Indians, not all Bangladeshi immigrants are Muslim.

Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata party’s prime ministerial candidate, underlined this distinction sharply, when he addressed a rally in the state a little over a month ago, and argued for clemency for Bangladeshi Hindu immigrants. As reported in The Hindu, “Addressing a BJP rally in southern Assam town Silchar, [Modi] said that all the states of the country and not just Assam should share the burden of providing shelter to the Bangladeshi Hindus, who, he alleged, had been forced to come to India seeking shelter due to “persecution” in the neighbouring country. He, however, said that all ‘Bangladeshi infiltrators, who have infiltrated with a nefarious political design’ should be detected and sent back to where they belong."

This is where the D-voter issue meets Assam's politics of identity. There are Muslim D-voters, and there are Hindu D-voters. For the Assam Gana Parishad, both are equally despicable. Born out of the anti-immigrant politics of the eighties, the party has been on a declining graph, after two unremarkable stints in government, marked by, among other things, its failure to control immigration.

Buoyed by Modi, the BJP, which had allied with AGP in the 2009 national elections, is going alone this time. The party is keenly anticipating major electoral dividends to flow from its support for Bengali-speaking Hindus. But observers say the party is hobbled by a lack of state-level leadership.

The Congress, like it does in many other parts of India, is speaking in multiple voices. It is worried about the steady loss of its support base among Bengali speaking-Muslims, who are believed to be leaning heavily towards the eight-year-old Muslim-centric All-India United Democratic Front. To compensate, it wants to cultivate the Bengali-speaking Hindus, but is wary of alienating its Assamese-speaking voters, who are against immigration.

While D-voters cannot vote, I wondered who they would vote for, if they could. I went around looking for them, helped by Kamal Choudhary, the general secretary of the All Assam Bengali Youth Students’ Federation.

Like most Indian cities, the urban sprawl of Guwahati throws up some community-specific neighbourhoods.

Lal Ganesh is known for a large number of Bengali-speaking Hindu residents. Here, I met Nitai Das, a man in his forties who worked as a goldsmith for 25 years until his eyes wore out from the strain, and he turned to the relatively less difficult task of frying and selling pokuris, the Assamese equivalent of pakoras, from a roadside cart.

Ever since they were declared D-voters, Das and his wife have been holding on to a stack of documents –  certificates stating their respective fathers featured in the 1966 voter list, a bank passbook from 1971, the year the family moved to Guwahati, Das’s certificate of apprenticeship as a goldsmith from 1984.

“My father voted in Kolkata in 1966,” Das said. “But I cannot vote in Assam in 2014.”

“The police came to our house in December,” said his wife, Arpana Das. “We were given a notice and asked to appear in the tribunal. We went twice for the hearings. We took all our documents. Each time, we paid the lawyer Rs 1,000. But on both occasions, we came back without getting a chance to meet the magistrate.”

They are poor and they have two children to see through college. But the financial strain is not Arpana Das’s greatest worry. “Our advocate told us about a family that could not defend itself in court and was taken away to a detention camp by the police,” she said.

Even policemen in Assam are not immune to the D-voter labels.

In Hathigaon, known as a “minority” neighbourhood, I met a former police sub-inspector, a man in his sixties, Giasuddin Khan, who discovered he was a D-voter in his second decade of government service.

“My job kept me so busy that I couldn’t do much about it until I retired in 2011,” he said. Within months of retirement, Khan filed a case in the foreigners tribunal to get the D-mark removed from his name. It wasn’t hard for him to win. Born in Assam’s Barpeta district in 1951, Khan had school-leaving certificates from the sixties, job appointment letters from the seventies, and voter lists featuring the names of his entire family, except his own and his wife’s. “Even our sons have voter ID cards,” he said, “But we are still D-voters.” Despite the tribunal’s order upholding his citizenship, and RTI queries, Khan is still not sure whether his name has been transferred from the list of D-voters to that of legitimate ones.

These are not isolated cases. In 2012, the government tabled a White Paper on the foreigners issue, which contained startling statistics – of the 88,192 cases of D-voters that had been disposed by the tribunals, only 6,590 were found to be foreigners.



“I am educated. I could fight my case and win. But every time I went to the court, I would see many poor and illiterate people. I wondered how long, hard and exhausting a battle it would be for them,” Giasuddin Khan said.

If he was allowed to vote in 2014, who would he opt for, I asked him.

He paused, hesitated, and then clearing his throat, he said he admired the AIUDF, the Muslim-centric party, for “taking up our cause.”

In Lal Ganesh, I asked Nitai Das the same question. He took even lesser time to reveal his political preference. “The BJP,” he said. “It speaks for us.”

Given Assam's diversity, and the influence of alliances, candidates, and other voting factors, there might not be a polarised electoral outcome. But there’s little doubt that the D-voter issue continues to keep polarisation alive on the ground.

***

Click here to read all the stories Supriya Sharma has filed about her 2,500-km rail journey from Guwahati to Jammu to listen to India's conversations about the forthcoming elections -- and life.